Jessica Dawson
Still Lifes With Street Corner and Homeless Kids
The Washington Post, November 6, 2003
...The artist I most look forward to seeing in depth is Rome-based Giorgio Ortona. Represented here by five small oils on wood panels, Ortona produces tight, small notebook-page-size schemes of postwar architecture around Rome. Most feature blocky apartment houses from the 1960s and '70s. He paints them in a palette of blanched yellow and orange that seems to nearly obliterate the heaviness such buildings usually carry. Somehow cramped, rectilinear geometries end up feeling airy and Mediterranean...